Back in 1948 British novelist George Orwell penned his seminal work Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Even those who haven’t read the novel will recognize Big Brother, the
heavily mustachioed, Stalin-like icon who represents the ubiquitous
surveillance state. But to say that the central purpose of Orwell’s work
was to warn against National Security Agency-style tactics or an
oppressive society under a totalitarian government is to fail to fully
convey Orwell’s message. Yes, Orwell opposed all forms of tyranny, but
he was more concerned with how ideologies proliferate. One of his most
important insights was the role language plays in shaping our thoughts
and opinions. The term Orwellian does not mean anti-authoritarian. Neither does it refer to mass surveillance by an intrusive government. Properly used, Orwellian means the deceptive and manipulative use of language.

In his essay “Politics and the English Language” (1946) Orwell observed
that “political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and
murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”
In other words, certain political language (propaganda) uses words and
phrases to hide ugly truths. He foresaw how politicians would misstate
and mislead in order to stay in power, using words to distort more than
to inform, not to convey meaning but to undermine it.

In Nineteen Eighty-Four Orwell called this newspeak. And
because words have the power to shape thought, newspeak is a powerful
tool in the hands of a propagandist. Big Brother’s newspeak narrows
citizens’ range of thought, making it difficult for them to express, or
even to consider, unorthodox ideas that do not align with the state’s
goals — in effect, preventing any kind of logical thinking. Taken to an
extreme, the language of newspeak encourages something called doublethink,
a hypnotic state of cognitive dissonance in which one is compelled to
disregard one’s own perception in favor of the officially dictated
narrative. In other words, people accept a distorted reality rather than
reality itself and swallow the state’s distorted propositions and
claims instead of considering the “ugly truths” of reality.

One ugly truth important to everyone today can be stated quite simply: Some Muslims, inspired by Islam and in the name of their religion and the prophet Muhammad,
are orchestrating and executing acts of terrorism that seek to wreak
devastation on those who do not submit to Islamic values. During the
Obama administration, Americans have been deluged with Orwellian
newspeak through the use of euphemisms that serve to sanitize ugly
truths related to Islamic terrorism. In classic newspeak fashion, even
the word terrorism seems to have been eliminated from official
language. Janet Napolitano, Obama’s former chief of Homeland Security,
preferred the term man-caused disasters because, she said, “it
demonstrates that we want to move away from the politics of fear.” So,
terrorism is no longer a problem; violent extremism is. And the global war on terror, after first morphing into overseas contingency operations, is now simply referred to as CVE, short for countering violent extremism. The purpose of this Orwellian newspeak is to eschew all references to Islamic extremism, jihad, Islamic radicalism, and other such overt terms that make it difficult to deny that there’s a link between Islam and terrorism.

The White House refuses to acknowledge the religious/ideological threat
posed by Islam. It does not want any reference to the true motivation of
these attacks: terror against the “infidel” (non-Muslims and
Muslim-born unbelievers) carried out in the name of Islam as part of a
global jihadi movement. In fact, shootings by radical Muslims are
sometimes dismissed as “workplace violence.” President Obama, for
example, failed to mention that Army Major Nidal Malik Hasan, who
slaughtered thirteen of his fellow soldiers at the Fort Hood military
base in Texas in 2009, had been in contact with Anwar al-Awlaki, a
Yemen-based imam and senior recruiter for al-Qaeda. And when the first
reports emerged of a terrorist attack carried out by Syed Rizwan Farook
and his wife, Tashfeen Malik, at the Inland Regional Center in San
Bernardino, California, this December, President Obama, backed by a
mainstream media adhering to Muslim-related newspeak, attempted to
dismiss the shootings that killed fourteen and wounded two dozen others
at a Christmas party as another instance of “workplace violence.”

Using the technique of distraction and denial, Obama ignored the
obvious connection to radical Islam in the latter case. Instead, he
renewed his call for gun control, treating the terrorist attack as if it
were another gangland drive-by. Americans were supposed to believe that
it was not a carefully planned terrorist attack, that because a
co-worker allegedly made fun of Farook’s Islamic-style beard and
challenged him on his theology, Farook stormed out of the party, went
home, picked up his wife, and returned dressed in full-body tactical
gear and armed with automatic weapons to shoot up the place before
speeding away in a black SUV the couple rented. Fortunately, in this
case, as more and more details became available — for example, the
discovery in the couple’s home of ISIS and al-Qaeda videos, homemade
pipe bombs, and enough explosive material to blow up a small town — it
became more difficult for the country to practice mass doublethink.
That, however, did not stop the ongoing Muslim-related newspeak
campaign. Despite the fact that this attack (as well as many others) was
carried out by Muslims, in the name of Islam, some still refuse to link
it to Islam.

Does every Muslim commit acts of terror? Of course not. And as far
as we know, no one is alleging that. To be clear, we aren’t alleging
that either! But there are those Muslims who believe they are carrying
out the Qur’anic command to “strike terror into the hearts of infidels”
(3:151; 8:12) when they commit such acts. But without overtly
recognizing the obvious link between Islam and terrorism, it becomes
very difficult to combat the problem. One of today’s most prolific
Orwellian sayings that we’re supposed to accept uncritically is that
terrorist attacks have nothing to do with Islam. “Let’s be clear,”
Hillary Clinton tweeted on November 19, “Islam is not our adversary.
Muslims are peaceful and tolerant people and have nothing whatsoever to
do with terrorism.” But it is instructive to note that, while Islam may
not be our adversary, jihadists say they are motivated by Islam. They
have declared us their adversaries. They shout Allahu akbar!
when they kill people. On November 20, for example, terrorists in Mali
released hostages who could quote the Qur’an. Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, the
leader of ISIS, has a Ph.D. in Islamic Studies from the Islamic
University of Baghdad and openly talks about restoring the caliphate, a
distinctly Islamic tenet. And many of sound mind have pointed out the
obvious: The Islamic State is called the Islamic State.

Those not lured into the doublethink state of cognitive dissonance
can reasonably understand that some Muslims have quite a lot to do with
terrorism, and that Islam has more than a little something to do with
those Muslims and their barbaric actions. Like those who were led by
their hardcore theology to kill three thousand people on 9/11. Or blow
up trains in Spain. Or target London’s public transit system with bombs.
Or slaughter students at a Kenyan university. Or devastate a nightclub
in Indonesia. Or shoot up a shopping mall in Nairobi. Or lay siege to a
hotel in Mumbai. Or terrorize Nigerian schoolgirls. Or, you know, take
hostages in a Parisian concert hall before slaughtering one hundred and
thirty of them.

We are also, in our state of doublethink, expected to accept the
corollary that Muslims are peaceful and tolerant. Of course, it’s easy
to prove that some — indeed, many — Muslims are peaceful, if that means
they do not advocate acts of terrorism or take part in them. That’s
nice. But peacefulness and tolerance are not the same concept, nor do
they necessarily go hand in hand. When considering Muslim tolerance, one
might inquire: Are Muslim attitudes toward drinking alcohol tolerant?
(A restaurant that serves wine is said to be the embodiment of evil.)
Are Muslims tolerant when it comes to homosexuality and same-sex
marriage? (According to Sharia law, homosexuals are to be stoned and
thrown off a cliff.) Free speech? (Consider the attacks on the Charlie Hebdo
newspaper office in Paris, the assassination of filmmaker Theo van Gogh
in Amsterdam, or the fatwas against novelist Salman Rushdie and former
Dutch parliamentarian Ayaan Hirsi Ali.) Women’s rights? (Consider honor
killings, female genital mutilation, or that in Saudi Arabia women may
not drive and wife-beating is culturally acceptable.) Freedom of
religion? (Converts from Islam to Christianity are to receive the death
penalty.) Music? (London’s Royal College of Music has been called
“Satanic,” and imams have claimed that music is the way in which Jews
spread “the Satanic web” to corrupt young Muslims.) Art? (Painted images
are considered an insult.) Sports? (Playing chess has been compared to
dipping one’s hands in the blood of pigs, and some Muslim clerics have
condemned soccer as a Jewish and Christian tool to undermine Islamic
culture.) It would take a great deal of denial in order to assert that
Islam is a tolerant religion.

The same difficulty arises when trying to understand how Islam
qualifies as a “religion of peace,” as both President George W. Bush and
former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton have repeatedly maintained.
Never mind that the belief system of radical Islam is based on violent
passages from the Qur’an and Hadith, and modeled on the jihadist actions
of generations of Muslims — beginning with Muhammad himself, who
beheaded captives, enslaved children, and raped women captured in
battle, encouraging other Muslims to act likewise. (No, Muhammad is not
similar to Jesus Christ in any way, as some Western apologists
maintain.) Furthermore, Muhammad directed Muslims to wage war on the
members of other religions and bring them under submission to Islam.
According to most estimates, approximately eighteen thousand acts of
terrorism have been carried out in the name of Islam during the past
decade. And there’s little that has changed in this regard through the
centuries, going back to the decades immediately following the death of
Muhammad when Muslims had captured land and people within the borders of
over twenty-eight modern countries outside of Saudi Arabia. To this
day, not a week goes by that Muslims do not attempt to kill Christians,
Jews, Hindus, and Buddhists explicitly in the name of Allah. Statistics
speak the truth: Pick any thirty-day period during the previous year and
note the number of acts of terrorism throughout the world. Two
important points come to the fore: First, nearly one hundred percent of
the terrorist acts have been committed by Muslims overtly in the name of
Islam. From mid-March to mid-April 2015, for example, Muslim terrorism
occurred in twenty-five countries and amassed more than twenty-eight hundred
fatalities. The vast majority of these jihadi acts of radical Islamic
terror go unreported in the American media. On top of that, a Pew
Research report reveals that ninety-nine percent of Afghan Muslims,
ninety-one percent of Iraqi Muslims, and eighty-four percent of
Pakistani Muslims identify themselves as “fundamentalists” who favor
Sharia law. Thirty-nine percent of Afghanistan’s Muslims say they
consider violent acts such as suicide bombings as always or sometimes
justified “in defense of Islam.”

Another recent repeated affirmation of newspeak comes by way of the
claim — made by President Obama, Hillary Clinton, and a host of
primetime pundits — that jihadi attacks are inspired by the rhetoric of
Republican presidential candidates who dare to speak the words radical Islamic terrorism.
As such, it stands to reason that if those pesky Republican candidates
would just shut their traps when it comes to jihadi terrorism and all
things Muslim, the world would be a peaceful place where ISIS terrorists
would lay down their scimitars and Kalashnikovs and stop talking about
subjugating infidels and establishing the caliphate at the expense of
non-Muslims.

The only way one could stoop to such illogic would be to exercise the principle of doublethink.

It gets worse. Not only are we expected to disregard the facts of
history, both recent and ancient, in order to buy into the doublethink
regarding Islam, we are expected to accept the idea that we, the
American (or British or French or German) people, are responsible for
acts of terror and violence committed by Muslims. We are expected to
accept the idea that we are the problem, not the radical Muslim
jihadists. We are expected to accuse ourselves of being hateful
Islamophobes for simply pointing out the reality that terrorism is
connected to Islam, that Islam inspires terrorists, and that significant
chunks of Muslims hate their adopted Western nations (Sweden, Britain,
France, Germany, the U.S., etc.) with their democratic laws, privileges,
and recognition of human rights for all people.

As one paradoxical Orwellian aphorism states, “War is peace.” So
yes, in the Orwellian sense, Islam is a religion of peace. But just as
in Big Brother’s Oceania, the only way to peace is to wage war
constantly on others. And woe betide those who are unwilling to play
along. Woe betide those who suggest that this doublethink is a sham.
They will be singled out as “racist” bigots and — egad — “Islamophobes”
because, according to doublethink standards, it is a thoughtcrime even
to suggest anything negative about Islam.

But aren’t those who believe that we ought not criticize any aspect
of Islam or its adherents the ones who rightly ought to hold the
distinction of being Islamophobes? They are the ones who truly fear
Islam. They know that radical Islamic terror is a reality. But because
they are under the hypnotic political spell of doublethink, they are
unable to reconcile that with the liberal narrative that tells them
terrorism is unrelated to Islam, that Islam is a religion of peace, and
that the ultimate perpetrators of terrorism are those voices critical of
Islam. They are too busy giving an appearance of solidity to pure wind.